They expect Rust to elevate his play beyond what it is: a forward who can and SHOULD move up and down the lineup. These takes about how he should drive offense have always been wild. He got paid a bit of a premium for being a jack of all trades in-house guy, but his money and performance are basically spot on now.
The plain and simple issue is that he's stapled to Sid. That's dumb. Then again, we don't have any offensive weapons and since they seem so adverse to playing Geno with Sid and admitting we are truly only capable of 1 scoring line at the NHL level....so Rust is clearly and obviously better than any of the other spare parts we have floating around.